Sebastian, the very existence of one human body speaks of an almost unbelievable molecular and cellular cooperation that could hardly result through the bounty of the most auspicious works of chance.
I listened to this interview when it first dropped, and I can't stop thinking about it. (That Slit Theory explanation! Whoa! Mind blown!) Thank you, Dan and Sebastian, for a soulful and thought-provoking discussion.
To start with I was raised in an evangelical home. Now, I would say I’m agnostic. Who really knows? I think I’d be arrogant if I said I did. I do have a child who died. My Evangelical background did nothing to help me if anything it was counterproductive. At my lowest point I knew I had to find a way to engage with the world in the best way possible. At that time I had/have a daughter and aging parents who needed me. I decided the best way I could honor Bryan is by living a life which focused on kindness and compassion. This is when I became a mediator and interested in Buddhist practices. To say that they brought me back to life is and was an understatement. It gives me the peace which surpasses all understanding. I don’t know about an after life, but we keep those we’ve lost alive by how we live our lives. What is consciousness? Who knows? If I had a religion it would be called the Star Wars religion, because I believe there is a force. What it is I’m not sure, but it is a universal force that is guided by how it’s used.
I am deeply sorry for the loss of your beloved son, Bryan. I truly hope the Force enables some sort of reunion - either on this plane of existence or another.
It’s interesting to me that you found your way back to life focusing on kindness and compassion. My son died while I was pregnant with my daughter. I had several spiritual/mystical experiences during that time. The way I was able to embrace life again was to imagine that after my death I will face my son and he will ask me how his existence impacted me and what did I do to make the world a better place after he left. So I work to be a better person, a better mother to his sister and add whatever bit of goodness I can to this world. I remind myself that he died, I did not, I still have responsibilities in this life. I hope he is proud of me.
What's interesting to me is that my high school friends and I had these conversations 50 years ago... When we were stoned... And people thought we were crazy. 😂
I believe as his memory works on his experience, he will grow to be more thankful and grateful and generous. My dad, the evening before he died in hospital told me my deceased mum was in his room together with my grandmother and our family dog. God bless you both. Very interesting. Thank you.
i recently finally grasped the slit experiment as well as someone who hasn't taken a science class since freshman year of college can, but i had not yet heard anyone talk about the implication that consciousness could cause the universe (within one's subjective reality) to slot into place. i guess i'll be chewing on that the rest of my life. thanks guys! just finished meditation for fidgety skeptics and came looking for this kind of thing; i think i'll be getting mr junger's book soon too. great conversation.
What a fascinating and deeply thought-provoking interview. I’d love to see an interview or discussion between Deepak Chopra and S Junger. Would be very illuminating.
Absolutely fascinating. Another book on my reading list! I have always had a sense of knowing that there is a universal consciousness since I was a teen.
i just listened to him on the Joe Rogan Experience. I fell asleep and woke up to the end of this interview Now i have to rewind to the beginning to listen to the entire story. This is a totally different perspective...
Better to say that we just don't know what is going to happen than to say the universe is going to die. Too cavalier for words how the inner storyteller is always spinning yarns to create feelings of safety, belonging and mattering, The map is not the territory. I think a good follow up for you is Rupert Sheldrake, who has gone from atheist to back to church but sees the human experience in terms of energy fields. His kid Merlin is a trip- wrote a book on mushrooms called The Entangled Life that changed the way I see our human story over time. Rupert reminded me that dark matter makes up 4/5 of the universe. And we don't have a clue what it is. But like gravity, our collective mind makes it solid and ordinary. A complete mystery, but there you go...
I'm not sure if going back to church is going to please god enough to get Rupert a first class trip and five star accommodation. I think people most likely end up where they resonate best, nasty pieces of work (and there are plenty of those, sadly) may find more of their own kind down the bottom of a great big hole. (Rupert is very nice BTW)
@@tim59ism Rupert probably agrees with you on resonating. He sees the Father, Son and Holy spirit as fields of energy, early ways for our species to tell stories about how thought works. My own youtube bread crumbs have led me to Robert Sapolsky. I just finished his book Determined and am heading into Behave. Have you seen his talks? Sapolsky at least helps me understand the mindless violence of othering rooted in biology. And how come we can be so compassionate.
@@goodnatureart Hi, I come at this through over fifty years of studying near death experience. I've followed it all the way through, right from the beginning and science not only hasn't explained it, many scientists (some at least) are starting to accept that consciousness is not produced by the brain. It's hard for mainstream scientists to even consider such an outlandish idea, but the studies are now producing the results that would seem to back that up. I haven't read Robert Sapolsky, no.
I am guessing a kind of psychic shock tosses us humans into another reality (or realities) which exist whether we consciously believe in it it or not. These events happen all the time in near death and pre death experiences with human beings. The University of Virginia has had a long term program exploring some of these psychic events. I’ve read hundreds of near death experience reports but there are similarities and differences expressed by individuals and it seems people are presented with various details that are not uniform because some are religious, some not with the most consistent experience being “a being of light” with whom most of them interface which brings peace and d comfort. There is such variety in these events it leads me to believe that what people see is cued to what is most familiar to them during a stressful experience.
It's not actually true that all the elements of the near death experience can be reproduced at will by drugs or stimulation, but it sounds good, I guess.
Interesting bit- he says he does not believe that after death individuality remains, yet his father came to him as an individual. As he said himself- i felt my father's essence. What is more individual than essence of somebody?
Dan, you need to avail yourself to the lettered views of Bernardo Kastrup, PhD, PhD (degrees in computer engineering and philosophy of mind). His command of physics exceeds that of your guest by orders of magnitude ... but that said, Dr. Kastrup makes a compelling argument for consciousness as an ontological primitive. He's a post-materialist and now an analytic idealist. In short, the man is brilliant. Another person you need to interview is Donald Hoffman, PhD, who arrives at the same conclusion as Kastrup but from a slightly different angle. Cheers.
Bernado is a very smart guy but IMHO and even though I'm not as smart as him, substance dualism actually fits better. That's what the people report, anyway, why shouldn't we listen to them?
In short, both substance and property dualism lack parsimony. I suspect that if you better understood analytic idealism you'd see what I mean. However counterintuitive it may be, there are only two things we know: we're aware ... that is, we are conscious ... and the specious present. Matter is simply inferred; it's a theoretical abstraction. 🎉
Tim, let me provide a more complete (however limited) explanation: There is, indeed, a world out there, but the world out there isn’t physical in the sense we ordinarily attribute to the word. What we colloquially call physical properties result from an interaction between our own mental processes and the transpersonal mental processes within which we live. As you may know, this interaction is what physicists call ‘observation’ or ‘measurement,’ which cognitively magnifies one of the superposed possibilities out there, leading to the impression that we inhabit a physical world. But the so-called physical world is merely an image in the private mind of the individual observer; each one of us perceives our own physical world as defined by the context of our own observations. Under Kastrup’s analytic idealism, we inhabit a common environment independent of us all; it’s just that this common environment, in and of itself, does not rest on the well-defined properties we customarily associate with physicality. I highly recommend Kastrup's book "Why Materialism is Baloney" - a brilliant piece of writing IMHO. I hope that helps. Cheers.
@@DrFuzzyFace Thanks for that ! It's an interesting and quite persuasive idea and I can't refute it, nor can Bernado "prove it" (proof isn't really relevant, that's only available in Mathematics of course). I lean to substance dualism, that is what people who have cardiac arrests report, a separation. They are all adamant about this, many of them (a small percentage and some I've spoken to personally) report having anther "body" which can resemble their own. This "body" travels somewhere very real, ultra real, another dimension, a place that feels like home, they say and then of course it comes back (they are resuscitated).
It is as if he is in the midst of a personal, intimate battle that every reasonable man comes to at some point in life. There are no mathematically exact answers on this issue (NDE), and i think atheists, as much as people of faith, can hardly disengage from their beliefs. Perhaps the most reasonable position is to have an agnostic approach. An approach similar to that in the recent conference entitled "rethinking mortality exploring the intersection of life and death" (youtube) with updated data on NDEs and latest findings in science (from the last few months). Really interesting.
This reminds me of the Zen koan of the duck in the bottle. For those who don't know this koan,: You have a duck egg in a bottle and a duckling hatches, and you feed the duckling for years and it grows inside the bottle. One day you are faced with the problem of having to get the duck out of the bottle, and breaking the bottle will kill the duck. So, how do you get the duck out of the bottle without breaking the bottle and killing the duck. After the student tries thinking of every possible approach and becomes extremely frustrated, the solution may jump right out at him. ... It's out. (It's out because this is a thought experiment and in the mind of the student the duck in the bottle was imagined as real, and the student did not realise this and so the duck was impossible to get out of the bottle. The second the student remembers that this is something they have imagined, the duck is out because they have changed the parameters of what is "real".) So when Sebastian has his paranoid - like in the film "Inception" - koan of not being able to know whether he is alive or dead, he is frustrated and probably terrified of this existential question and how to answer it so as to resolve the personal koan. He can eliminate the problem by realizing that the problem is one of his being bound much as the student with the duck koan is bound, until it collapses in the knowledge that he is maintaining the reality of paranoia of not knowing if he is alive or dead. My, "it is out" for this is that it is irrelevant if I am alive or dead. The subjective reality of experience has not changed. My wife - whether imagined or real - is just as real experientially one way or the other, and that being so, it is irrelevant, and the paranoia bubble pops. (I am out.)
Junger is explaining the basics of Philosophical Idealism btw. It's a worldview that solves all the confusion that Scientific Materialist can't solve. 😃
Ended up feeling kind of sorry for this guy, sometimes things are a whole lot simpler than they seem and he just sounds so tangled up in his own thoughts... That's just me, sorry. 🌻
Love has no religion and neither does God. There is a power in the universe which is constantly working for our good. It will work for us in definite ways as we recognize it and let it! No need to convince God of anything - we are all His holy children no matter what you believe. You cannot be where God is not♥️🌠
Great interview. I'm a long time fan of both of you.
Sebastian, the very existence of one human body speaks of an almost unbelievable molecular and cellular cooperation that could hardly result through the bounty of the most auspicious works of chance.
I listened to this interview when it first dropped, and I can't stop thinking about it. (That Slit Theory explanation! Whoa! Mind blown!) Thank you, Dan and Sebastian, for a soulful and thought-provoking discussion.
To start with I was raised in an evangelical home. Now, I would say I’m agnostic. Who really knows? I think I’d be arrogant if I said I did. I do have a child who died. My Evangelical background did nothing to help me if anything it was counterproductive. At my lowest point I knew I had to find a way to engage with the world in the best way possible. At that time I had/have a daughter and aging parents who needed me. I decided the best way I could honor Bryan is by living a life which focused on kindness and compassion. This is when I became a mediator and interested in Buddhist practices. To say that they brought me back to life is and was an understatement. It gives me the peace which surpasses all understanding. I don’t know about an after life, but we keep those we’ve lost alive by how we live our lives. What is consciousness? Who knows? If I had a religion it would be called the Star Wars religion, because I believe there is a force. What it is I’m not sure, but it is a universal force that is guided by how it’s used.
I am deeply sorry for the loss of your beloved son, Bryan. I truly hope the Force enables some sort of reunion - either on this plane of existence or another.
J😢😢sm😊
It’s interesting to me that you found your way back to life focusing on kindness and compassion. My son died while I was pregnant with my daughter. I had several spiritual/mystical experiences during that time. The way I was able to embrace life again was to imagine that after my death I will face my son and he will ask me how his existence impacted me and what did I do to make the world a better place after he left. So I work to be a better person, a better mother to his sister and add whatever bit of goodness I can to this world. I remind myself that he died, I did not, I still have responsibilities in this life. I hope he is proud of me.
What's interesting to me is that my high school friends and I had these conversations 50 years ago... When we were stoned... And people thought we were crazy. 😂
I believe as his memory works on his experience, he will grow to be more thankful and grateful and generous. My dad, the evening before he died in hospital told me my deceased mum was in his room together with my grandmother and our family dog. God bless you both. Very interesting. Thank you.
i recently finally grasped the slit experiment as well as someone who hasn't taken a science class since freshman year of college can, but i had not yet heard anyone talk about the implication that consciousness could cause the universe (within one's subjective reality) to slot into place. i guess i'll be chewing on that the rest of my life. thanks guys! just finished meditation for fidgety skeptics and came looking for this kind of thing; i think i'll be getting mr junger's book soon too. great conversation.
What a fascinating and deeply thought-provoking interview. I’d love to see an interview or discussion between Deepak Chopra and S Junger. Would be very illuminating.
Amazing insights after his near death experience. Thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.
Absolutely fascinating. Another book on my reading list! I have always had a sense of knowing that there is a universal consciousness since I was a teen.
i just listened to him on the Joe Rogan Experience. I fell asleep and woke up to the end of this interview Now i have to rewind to the beginning to listen to the entire story.
This is a totally different perspective...
Better to say that we just don't know what is going to happen than to say the universe is going to die. Too cavalier for words how the inner storyteller is always spinning yarns to create feelings of safety, belonging and mattering, The map is not the territory. I think a good follow up for you is Rupert Sheldrake, who has gone from atheist to back to church but sees the human experience in terms of energy fields. His kid Merlin is a trip- wrote a book on mushrooms called The Entangled Life that changed the way I see our human story over time. Rupert reminded me that dark matter makes up 4/5 of the universe. And we don't have a clue what it is. But like gravity, our collective mind makes it solid and ordinary. A complete mystery, but there you go...
We appreciate your feedback!
I'm not sure if going back to church is going to please god enough to get Rupert a first class trip and five star accommodation. I think people most likely end up where they resonate best, nasty pieces of work (and there are plenty of those, sadly) may find more of their own kind down the bottom of a great big hole. (Rupert is very nice BTW)
@@tim59ism Rupert probably agrees with you on resonating. He sees the Father, Son and Holy spirit as fields of energy, early ways for our species to tell stories about how thought works. My own youtube bread crumbs have led me to Robert Sapolsky. I just finished his book Determined and am heading into Behave. Have you seen his talks? Sapolsky at least helps me understand the mindless violence of othering rooted in biology. And how come we can be so compassionate.
@@goodnatureart Hi, I come at this through over fifty years of studying near death experience. I've followed it all the way through, right from the beginning and science not only hasn't explained it, many scientists (some at least) are starting to accept that consciousness is not produced by the brain. It's hard for mainstream scientists to even consider such an outlandish idea, but the studies are now producing the results that would seem to back that up. I haven't read Robert Sapolsky, no.
@@tim59ism consciousness is everywhere.
Praying Sebastian will open his heart to our Awesome GOD.
I am guessing a kind of psychic shock tosses us humans into another reality (or realities) which exist whether we consciously believe in it it or not. These events happen all the time in near death and pre death experiences with human beings. The University of Virginia has had a long term program exploring some of these psychic events. I’ve read hundreds of near death experience reports but there are similarities and differences expressed by individuals and it seems people are presented with various details that are not uniform because some are religious, some not with the most consistent experience being “a being of light” with whom most of them interface which brings peace and d comfort. There is such variety in these events it leads me to believe that what people see is cued to what is most familiar to them during a stressful experience.
It's not actually true that all the elements of the near death experience can be reproduced at will by drugs or stimulation, but it sounds good, I guess.
❤miraculous life story ❤️🥇
Interesting bit- he says he does not believe that after death individuality remains, yet his father came to him as an individual. As he said himself- i felt my father's essence. What is more individual than essence of somebody?
I need one of those 10% Happier sweatshirts that Dan is wearing in the promo section
Go to danharris.com in the Shop page!
We are making this up as we go along. YOU are creator! Have fun!
Yes!
Dan, you need to avail yourself to the lettered views of Bernardo Kastrup, PhD, PhD (degrees in computer engineering and philosophy of mind). His command of physics exceeds that of your guest by orders of magnitude ... but that said, Dr. Kastrup makes a compelling argument for consciousness as an ontological primitive. He's a post-materialist and now an analytic idealist. In short, the man is brilliant. Another person you need to interview is Donald Hoffman, PhD, who arrives at the same conclusion as Kastrup but from a slightly different angle. Cheers.
Bernado is a very smart guy but IMHO and even though I'm not as smart as him, substance dualism actually fits better. That's what the people report, anyway, why shouldn't we listen to them?
In short, both substance and property dualism lack parsimony. I suspect that if you better understood analytic idealism you'd see what I mean. However counterintuitive it may be, there are only two things we know: we're aware ... that is, we are conscious ... and the specious present. Matter is simply inferred; it's a theoretical abstraction. 🎉
Tim, let me provide a more complete (however limited) explanation: There is, indeed, a world out there, but the world out there isn’t physical in the sense we ordinarily attribute to the word. What we colloquially call physical properties result from an interaction between our own mental processes and the transpersonal mental processes within which we live. As you may know, this interaction is what physicists call ‘observation’ or ‘measurement,’ which cognitively magnifies one of the superposed possibilities out there, leading to the impression that we inhabit a physical world. But the so-called physical world is merely an image in the private mind of the individual observer; each one of us perceives our own physical world as defined by the context of our own observations. Under Kastrup’s analytic idealism, we inhabit a common environment independent of us all; it’s just that this common environment, in and of itself, does not rest on the well-defined properties we customarily associate with physicality.
I highly recommend Kastrup's book "Why Materialism is Baloney" - a brilliant piece of writing IMHO. I hope that helps. Cheers.
@@DrFuzzyFace Thanks for that ! It's an interesting and quite persuasive idea and I can't refute it, nor can Bernado "prove it" (proof isn't really relevant, that's only available in Mathematics of course). I lean to substance dualism, that is what people who have cardiac arrests report, a separation. They are all adamant about this, many of them (a small percentage and some I've spoken to personally) report having anther "body" which can resemble their own. This "body" travels somewhere very real, ultra real, another dimension, a place that feels like home, they say and then of course it comes back (they are resuscitated).
@@tim59ism Like you, perhaps, it's my belief that we are here to live, learn, and love. Be well, my friend. 🧡
It is as if he is in the midst of a personal, intimate battle that every reasonable man comes to at some point in life.
There are no mathematically exact answers on this issue (NDE), and i think atheists, as much as people of faith, can hardly disengage from their beliefs.
Perhaps the most reasonable position is to have an agnostic approach.
An approach similar to that in the recent conference entitled "rethinking mortality exploring the intersection of life and death" (youtube)
with updated data on NDEs and latest findings in science (from the last few months).
Really interesting.
This reminds me of the Zen koan of the duck in the bottle. For those who don't know this koan,: You have a duck egg in a bottle and a duckling hatches, and you feed the duckling for years and it grows inside the bottle. One day you are faced with the problem of having to get the duck out of the bottle, and breaking the bottle will kill the duck. So, how do you get the duck out of the bottle without breaking the bottle and killing the duck.
After the student tries thinking of every possible approach and becomes extremely frustrated, the solution may jump right out at him. ... It's out. (It's out because this is a thought experiment and in the mind of the student the duck in the bottle was imagined as real, and the student did not realise this and so the duck was impossible to get out of the bottle. The second the student remembers that this is something they have imagined, the duck is out because they have changed the parameters of what is "real".)
So when Sebastian has his paranoid - like in the film "Inception" - koan of not being able to know whether he is alive or dead, he is frustrated and probably terrified of this existential question and how to answer it so as to resolve the personal koan. He can eliminate the problem by realizing that the problem is one of his being bound much as the student with the duck koan is bound, until it collapses in the knowledge that he is maintaining the reality of paranoia of not knowing if he is alive or dead. My, "it is out" for this is that it is irrelevant if I am alive or dead. The subjective reality of experience has not changed. My wife - whether imagined or real - is just as real experientially one way or the other, and that being so, it is irrelevant, and the paranoia bubble pops. (I am out.)
I'm afraid his description of quantum mechanics is not very good, but not necessary for his story, I'll read his book
Thanks for the feedback!
Junger is explaining the basics of Philosophical Idealism btw. It's a worldview that solves all the confusion that Scientific Materialist can't solve. 😃
This guy is very confused. Great story though.
As a self-described atheist, his tour pitching this new book is bound to be kinda weird. This stuff is well intentioned and all over the place.
Junger is a cool guy but it's frustrating that he never gets very close to this moving and well documented subject covered much better elsewhere.
Ended up feeling kind of sorry for this guy, sometimes things are a whole lot simpler than they seem and he just sounds so tangled up in his own thoughts... That's just me, sorry. 🌻
Yes. It’s that simple. 01001 codes in color for us. A matrix
Love has no religion and neither does God.
There is a power in the universe which is constantly working for our good. It will work for us in definite ways as we recognize it and let it! No need to convince God of anything - we are all His holy children no matter what you believe. You cannot be where God is not♥️🌠